The Act Factor

In our current times of so much uncertainty about the future, about so many unknowns and with so many threats, it is very easy to feel overwhelmed. The enormity of the problems is so that we become stagnant. We feel useless and think that whatever we try is won’t make any difference. And then, we become apathetic and just keep living as if everything is all right.

I believe that is the worst attitude we can take.

Let me share this little story about a hummingbird that Wangari Mattaai tells to children:

The story of the hummingbird is about this huge forest being consumed by a fire. All the animals in the forest come out and they are transfixed as they watch the forest burning and they feel very overwhelmed, very powerless, except this little hummingbird. It says, ‘I’m going to do something about the fire!’ So it flies to the nearest stream and takes a drop of water. It puts it on the fire, and goes up and down, up and down, up and down, as fast as it can. In the meantime all the other animals, much bigger animals like the elephant with a big trunk [that] could bring much more water, they are standing there helpless. And they are saying to the hummingbird, ‘What do you think you can do? You are too little. This fire is too big. Your wings are too little and your beak is so small that you can only bring a small drop of water at a time.’ But as they continue to discourage it, it turns to them without wasting any time and it tells them ‘I am doing the best I can.

There are many stories, quotes, poems and songs with similar messages. For instance, take the Gaviotas case, a legendary village in Colombia that was created by a group of visionaries lead by Paolo Lugari about 40 years ago, in the middle of the eastern savannas. After all these years, and after trying many things, among many amazing things, they have created a 20,000 acres forest. But the important thing here is that, as Lugari explains, he never intended for Gaviotas to serve as a blueprint for sustainable development, or even a clearinghouse of appropriate technologies. Instead, he wanted to show the world that is was possible to live sustainable by drawing on local resources, or as he describes, living within the economy of the near.

One of Lugari’s mantras for their work is A.V.V., alli vamos viendo, meaning we will see what happens as we go along.

All the extraordinary things in Gaviotas have not happened as a result of brilliant planning but of a trial and error process, replete with wrong turns and detours. It hasn’t been an orchestrated march towards a finished product, what has been important is only the process, the unpredictable evolution of strategies and ideas say Seth Biderman and Christian Casillas that recently visited Gaviotas.

Other examples:

Antonio Machado’ poem that says caminante no hay camino.. se hace camino al andar; meaning traveler, there is no road; the road is made by walking

An old Chinese proverb: the journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.

Dag Hammarskjold said never look down to test the ground before taking your next step; only those who keep their eye fixed on the far horizon will find their right road.

There is even an old Latin phrase that goes Solvitur ambulando, meaning it is solved by walking or the problem is solved by a practical experiment.

That is the key point, no matter how bad is the outlook, we must try something, we must take the first step.

We must hit the road and try our best. Caring and having empathy for future generations will help.

If we all took this approach, we will be building resilience and things can be very different.

Succession and Resilience

Our planet is sick, very sick. And it is basically our fault.

A few of the major symptoms are climate change, poverty, food scarcity, wars, peak oil and peak economy. Let me dare to suggest that the planetary disease is over consumption, overpopulation. In essence, our unlimited economic growth culture. And because of this, the planet is facing a global system failure: many interrelated systems are failing at the same time with a catastrophic result for Earth. Many people say this collapse will happen in this century and it will be a very different world after that.

A fundamental concept in ecology is something called succession, that refers to more or less predictable and orderly adaptive changes in the structure of an ecological community, or an ecosystem. After several of these changes, called seres, the ecosystem reaches a steady state called climax-community. For instance, after hundreds and hundreds of years, an old growth forest reaches its climax.

Extending this succession concept to social-ecosystems, we can say our society is currently going through a very rough change and nobody really knows how fast it’ll happen, nor how long, nor what will be the end result of it. I think the timeline could be quite long and it will take a few steps to reach its climax state.

A recent case of such succession is what happened in Cuba in the past 50 years or so. They were forced to tackle a sudden succession, when oil and many goods and services stop coming to their island, and they may be close to their climax state.

For different reasons, many other countries may face similar sudden successions, while others will go through long successions to reach its own climax.

The first step we are already facing is scarcity and high prices of many goods and services, and I am afraid it will only get worse. The next step we may face is something many people are calling a salvaging phase, where we will need to relearn, reuse, reclaim, repair old stuff, as there will be very few new things to buy. We may need to use manual tools, walk a lot, use horses and sail boats, since there won’t be much oil to keep running all our machines, and more. Our resilience level will be tested.

I haven’t watched the movie The Age of Stupid, but I have read it makes you think where the world is heading. I read that one of the passages in the movie is when this historian character is checking old films and contemplates the last years in which humanity could have saved itself from global ecological collapse. And then he wonders,

“Why didn’t we save ourselves when we had the chance?”
"Were we just being stupid?
or was it that “on some level we weren’t sure that we were worth saving?”

I think the answer has little to do with humans being stupid or self-destructive but everything to do with our current culture of over consumerism and overpopulation. And we know that as consumption has risen, more fossil fuels, minerals, and metals have been mined from the earth, and more trees have been cut down. For instance, a new report from Wordwatch Institute says: “the world extracts the equivalent of 112 Empire State Buildings from the earth every single day.” ! Yikes !

It seems to me that we need a fundamental change in our culture, based on ecology, not on economics. Based on caring, not on material possessions. In other words, what we need is a basic reshuffling of global priorities.

The more people is aware of what lies ahead, and accept the need for change, the better the chances to build resilience and make it easier for future generations to face the future.

We need to tackle this together, at the global and the local level, in true community, and most importantly, with an intergenerational scope.